The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Many organizations frequently conduct operations that include organization members performing activities in a dispersed geographic area. For example, the operations of a law enforcement agency typically include police officers patrolling assigned geographic areas, responding to crime scenes, and interviewing suspects and witnesses. As another example, a disaster relief organization may respond to a natural disaster by sending out aid workers to a disaster area to locate and provide assistance to those in crisis. These types of operations may be referred to as field operations and may generally include monitoring specific geographic areas and subjects, interacting with persons of interest, responding to and reporting information about the occurrence of notable events, and any other activities that an organization member may perform in the field.
In order to better coordinate field operations, an organization may employ one or more other organization members at a centralized location, referred to herein as operations analysts, that help coordinate the activities of the organization members in the field, referred to herein as field analysts. For example, operations analysts may be responsible for instructing field analysts on particular locations to investigate or subjects to monitor. Similarly, field analysts may be expected to communicate certain information related to the field operations back to operations analysts.
Both field analysts and operations analysts face a number of challenges in efficiently conducting field operations. These challenges include enabling field analysts to maintain a situational awareness of the environment in which the field analysts are operating, including maintaining an awareness of the location and activities of other field analysts. Additionally, field analysts typically lack efficient access to information that may have been previously collected and shared by other field analysts and to real-time updates of such shared information. Operations analysts similarly lack ways of maintaining a meaningful awareness of the activities of a possibly large number of field analysts for whom the operation analysts are responsible and sharing detailed information with those field analysts.